Recipes This Week: Violet Foods, Fermented Garlic, Vinegar, and Herbs

This past week, I vowed to get outside and take better advantage of the plants, herbs, and "weeds" growing in our garden! Foraging from my yard gives me such a deep sense of satisfaction, especially as I'm beginning to learn the specialty and medicinal plants. We also decided to try out two separate fermented garlic recipes. Here's what we've been making…

Super Frugal Grocery Mini Challenge #3: Plan Ahead

Sauerkraut, pickled sunchokes, red sauerkraut, and kimchi— make once, eat all month!

(Read all Super Frugal Grocery Challenge posts here!)

Today's challenge, should you choose to accept it: Take some time to plan ahead.

When I look over my food budget for the past several months, what jumps out to me is that most of the times I spent more than usual, it was because I was unprepared.

The weather was nice and we decided to take a day trip, and I didn't have any snacks for us to bring. We were spontaneously invited over for dinner and didn't have a side dish to share. I forgot to pack snacks for Zach to take to work. We were out errand-running and got hungry in between meals. I didn't know what to make for dinner and getting pizza seemed easier. The excuses go on and on, but they boil down to one thing: a lack of planning ahead.

One of the best ways to consistently keep a budget of any kind low, but especially on the food front, is to think about what you can do now to make your meal prep easier later.

The best way to start is to think back to all the times that you were caught unprepared. What was the reason? How could you have avoided it? How can you block out time to prepare so you won't get caught off-guard again?

This will be completely different for each person, but this might look like…

• Making a meal plan at the beginning of each week so you know exactly what you're making for dinner each night

• Keeping a stash of snacks in the pantry, your purse, and/or the car

• Having meals, side dishes, or snacks in the freezer

• Growing a garden (you're never caught unawares when someone asks you to bring a salad to the barbecue!)

• Prepping a lot of grab-and-go meals on a week when you know you're going to be rushing around

• Starting a meal in the crockpot in the morning so it'll be ready in the evening

• Baking a loaf of bread

• Making sauerkraut or other preserved veggies 

• Taking snacks as well as a sandwich to work

• Roasting a big batch of veggies, cooking a bunch of beans, throwing some meat in the crockpot, and boiling a couple different grains at the beginning of the week for easy mix-n-match meals

• Removing items from the freezer to thaw the night before you need them

• Making your own fast food

• Doing the dishes so it'll be easier to cook later

• Making an extra meatloaf, lasagna, or pot of chili so you can freeze some

• Creating a grocery list rather than just going to the store and grabbing whatever looks good

• Soaking beans or grains to cook later

• Keeping a stash of granola bars in your purse

What are your favorite ways to plan ahead?

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This Week: Christmas Traditions, Sickness, and Landmark Lasagna

Mikko is always excited to visit Santa!

As all my friends know, December is always my busiest time of year: finishing up the teaching semester while entertaining thousands of people on weekends, Wednesdays, and Fridays. My delightful friend Mikko the Scandinavian Elf is appearing for her 12th season (and my 14th) of St. Charles Christmas Traditions, and she is crazy and hyper as ever! Our cast and crew this year are truly amazing, and even though the work is physically exhausting, my heart feels full after spending a day with these beautiful people. If you're in the area, please come down and visit! (Check out the link here.) 

Other random stuff we've been up to:

Getting sick. I have gotten sick not once but twice lately, possibly due to the aforementioned interacting with thousands of people every weekend. I've been sipping bone broth, chugging cold-kicker remedy (apple cider vinegar infused for a month with garlic, onion, horseradish, cayenne, sage, rosemary, and turmeric), and getting lots of rest, which has helped… but my body is definitely telling me that I need to wash my hands more and build my immunity better.

Making this lasagna. I went on a clean-out-the-freezer kick and unearthed some nettle we'd foraged and tomato sauce we'd grown in 2018, and it was begging to be made into a lasagna. So I made foraged-nettle béchamel sauce, homegrown-tomato sauce, and from-scratch noodles, and baked it together. I was so ridiculously happy about all that this lasagna signified: I have learned so much in the past couple years! This was a very tasty way to celebrate my progress.

Christmas sale for my cards! A few of my card sets are on sale at my Single Candle Card Productions shop— please click on the link to check them out!  I was happy with the way these chickadees turned out, since they are one of my favorite birds.

Also, our housemate Eddie being cute: You're welcome.

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This Week (Leaves and Snow, Water Kefir, and Pasta)

(Well, past couple weeks— but who's counting?)

Anniversary trip

Zach and I have been married seven years now, which kind of boggles my mind! We took a mini road trip (in our electric car!) which involved hiking during peak leaf season as well as visiting Cahokia Mounds, the largest ancient earthenworks in North America (I'd only visited once when I was a kid, and was not impressed— coming here as an adult, I was completely blown away!).

Pere Marquette State Park

Monk's Mound at Cahokia

View from Monk's Mound: see the St. Louis skyline in the distance?

Dismantling the compost pile

After two years of "cooking," our compost pile was ready to be taken apart so we could get some of the goodness inside. We pulled apart the pallets, raked off the woody stuff, and excavated more than a cubic yard of beautiful black soil! We hauled this to our front yard and covered half of it with a new layer of compost, into which we seeded some winter rye. The rye didn't get a chance to sprout, though, because sub-freezing nights and then an inch of snow hit soon afterward— crazy weather for this time of year! (We also harvested like three sunchoke plants and already had more tubers than we knew what to do with.)

Zach trimming our 15-foot-tall sunchokes

Getting started on the front yard!

First sunchoke haul of the year

Sunchokes pickling (bottom right) next to some daikon and carrot (bottom left), and sauerkraut and pickled beets up top

Water kefir

We got a new fermented pet— water kefir, which is a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) that feeds on sugar water, and with some care can produce a sweet carbonated drink. I'll write a more detailed post on it later, but suffice it to say that it tastes like soda with a fraction of the sugar, so Zach is very happy to be working with it!

The "grains" we got in the mail

Homemade pasta and experimental lentils

I'd been wanting to try pasta-making for quite a while, and in the past couple weeks I've tried it out three different times, with success! My favorite recipe is this one because it doesn't require eggs (meaning I'm more likely to have the ingredients on hand to make it), although I used an egg-noodle recipe to make pierogis. Other kitchen adventures included lentil burgers and lentil loaf (like meatloaf), both of which turned out pretty well. We have a ton of lentils in our pantry for some reason, so I'm looking for ways to use them up!

What have you been up to this week?

 

Pierogis: mashed potatoes, cheese and sauerkraut tucked into a pasta wrapper and boiled, then fried in butter. YUM.
(May I also draw your attention to that delicious red-cabbage-apple-beet-ginger sauerkraut. Also yum.)

Lentil loaf with sweet chile sauce, quinoa, and sauerkraut

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This Week: The Food Is Aliiiive! (And Some Hiking)

This peacock lives down the road from us and we found him eating the fallen blossoms. (He is alive, but he is not food.)

"Week" is a pretty loose term around here, as you may have noticed, especially when I lose a few days to some sort of mild flu. As I sit here sniffling and listening to the sound of the rain, I have to shuffle through my photos to help me remember what's been going on since the last update. In short? A few outdoor activities, and lots of mad kitchen science.

Homemade tempeh. Tempeh is a soybean (or any other kind of bean) product made by introducing a particular kind of spore to the beans, which then forms into a janky-looking covering of fuzzy white mold, similar to bleu cheese. Tempeh making is much more temperamental than tofu, so I left the project up to Zach— hence the mad science. The tempeh has to incubate at a particular temperature for 12-24 hours, so Zach bought a temperature-controlling device, which hooks up to a crockpot full of water, which is covered with a pan with the tempeh on it, which is covered with a towel to keep the heat in. I'm sorry to say I didn't get a picture while it was going on, but I did snap some shots of the tempeh when I was cooking it. It doesn't hold together as well as it should (we think we need to cook the soybeans more prior to fermenting them), but after being marinated in a soy-sauce-maple-syrup-paprika-garlic-liquid-smoke sauce and then pan-fried, it was darn delicious. Zach is going to try making another batch tonight to refine his technique. I get to cook and eat his creations. Win-win.

A cross-section of the tempeh. See the white fungus on top?

Marinating...

Frying...

Ready to eat!

Incubating yogurt with the fancy new temperature control

Yogurt. I had made yogurt years ago, but had switched to kefir since it's much easier. However, Zach's love for yogurt inspired him to get me to try again. The first batch (my batch) utterly failed because the culture I used (some leftover kefir) wasn't strong enough (the thickened milk was used for buckwheat pancakes instead), but Zach tried again with a different starter (fancy yogurt from the produce store), and was successful (method here if you want to try it). He's been eating it by the pint. 

Mead. Zach started a batch of mead, with a little help from supplies bought at the local brewing shop. 

Miscellaneous ferments. We also made a big batch of sauerkraut, some hot pepper mash that will eventually become hot sauce, and homemade fermented mayonnaise, which is pretty delicious. It's a fermented food kind of week! Next we're going to try sourdough tortillas.

The Wildwood Trail. With the help of a car, a shuttle bus, and some running down a mountainside to catch the aforementioned bus, we managed to hike the last section of the 30.2-mile-long Wildwood Trail in Portland's Forest Park. We have previously hiked two other parts of it, but now we've officially section-hiked it! If you live anywhere near this incredible trail, you are missing out if you don't check it out. 

Lacamas Creek Trail. Located in Camas, WA (a bus ride away from where we live), this is another gorgeous trail tucked into the unassuming urban sprawl. We've hiked it twice in the past few weeks, winding through woods, along a picturesque creek and lake, and over a meadow with the last of the camas lilies blooming.

See the cormorant perched on a tiny log in the water?

Reading: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein. I'm about halfway through this book, and holy schaMOLEY is it depressing. But I'm learning a lot, and I can feel my perspectives shifting as I more clearly and intentionally contemplate the crisis that humanity finds itself in today with our current economic system's effect on the changing climate. If you're into dense, depressing, but incredibly thought-provoking books about the environment, this is a good one. 

What have you been up to this week?

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